Utilitarianism Do More Good Than Harm

“Got the flu? Stay home! Get better. It's costing us billions” an article written by Frank Witsil brings up an important aspect of our working lives. When we get sick, most of the time we don’t have the choice of staying home and recovering from the illness. We have to go to work in order to pay for our bills and survive. Because of this, there is a chance of the illness spreading onto another employee causing the illness to spread rapidly and more frequently. This may cause the employers to lose money and additionally cause the person you spread it to have a chance of getting more severe symptoms that can possibly prevent them from going to work or cause them to die. Furthermore, the amount of money companies have lost because of illness has
Utilitarianism is a type ethical reasoning that states that when you are in a situation where you have to make a moral decision you have to choose the one that produces more benefits than harm. Happiness is very important to a utilitarian. For a utilitarian to be an efficient utilitarian they must think about their actions often and calculate the good consequences and the bad ones. They have to choose the best outcome no matter what they personally believe in. So to sum utilitarianism up, consequences are the main part a utilitarian has to look for. The consequences that produce the most pleasure are the one a utilitarian must always choose this is also known as act utilitarianism. They must always avoid the choices that cause more suffering. For instance, if a utilitarian was put into a situation where they had to choose if either their mother was going to get shot in the head or twenty strangers were going to get shot in the head the utilitarian would choose their mother to get shot in the head. If the twenty strangers were to get shot it would cause way more people to suffer. The family members would also suffer from the sadness of the losses. Besides act utilitarianism there is rule utilitarianism. Rule Utilitarianism was made in order for people to stop making utility decisions that would only benefit in the short run and follow rules that would increase greater happiness in the long
It would be ethically immoral because the person who came into work sick has a chance of spreading their illness and causing more and more employees to suffer. If the employee were to stay home they would only deal with their own suffering which is just one person who suffers. Since it spread to another employee that employee also might spread it to their family members causing their spouse or children to get sick. This ends up being an endless pandemic. That one employee who got sick caused the most suffering for the greatest amount of people instead of causing the greatness amount of happiness or pleasure. That is not all since more an more people are getting sick that causes companies to lose money which in turn means a lot of employees might lose their jobs because companies especially local companies are not making enough money in order to pay their employees. This causes people who are looking for jobs to suffer because there are less and less job openings. So if a utilitarian got sick he would have to sacrifice himself in order to keep the greatest amount of health and pleasure going even if it meant that he was going to lose his house, car, or job because he didn’t have enough money to pay for those things. If a person contracted a deadly virus that was incurable there would probably be a lot of people trying to kill that person. Rule Utilitarianism protects that person from being killed